Rapper Nas performs onstage at the opening night concert for the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Getty Images

In 1994, Nasir Jones shifted the rap world with an album that captured a New York neighborhood engulfed by crack cocaine and violence that had killed his best friend. Twenty years later, his cinematic portrait of Queensbridge was celebrated at the gala opening of the Tribeca Film Festival.

On Wednesday night at the Beacon Theatre, the premiere of a documentary film about the album “Illmatic,” and a performance of it by Nas, functioned as a live retrospective of his early career. The 40-year-old rapper paced the stage and sent shout-outs to music producers in the audience–hip-hop game-changers in their own right–who made the sound of “Illmatic” as striking as his lyrical flow.

It’s the second year in a row that the Tribeca Film Festival opened with a music-related movie, following 2013’s “Mistaken for Strangers,” featuring members of the band the National. Festival organizers said they selected the Nas movie, titled “Time is Illmatic,” not only because it tells a New York success story, but because it also received support and funding through the Tribeca Film Institute.

“This movie has been homegrown,” said festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal as she shared the red carpet Wednesday night with rappers such as Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon the Chef. Her fellow co-founder Robert De Niro, holding hands with his wife Grace Hightower, shrugged and admitted he didn’t know any Nas songs (he grew up listening to groups like the Shirelles). Later he would introduce the movie with a joke about “Illmatic” coming out 20 years ago, “when I was already 20 years too old” to be a hip-hop fan.

“Time Is Illmatic” has some years on it, too. Director One9 and writer Erik Parker, a former editor at Vibe magazine, originally started the project to mark a different anniversary of the album–it’s tenth. They said they often struggled to keep momentum as they sought funding, access and resources. For instance, some of the concert footage in the film was originally shot by crews working for Hennessy, for whom Nas is a spokesman. The resulting movie is “not really a music doc, it’s a survival story,” said One9, a first-time director. “Nas told the experience of walking the streets. But he wasn’t preachy. He was giving it to you raw and real.”

The story centers on Nas’s youth in Queensbridge, the housing project across the East River from Manhattan, where he dropped out of school in junior high and his best friend was shot to death after a night at the movies. His younger brother Jabari “Jungle” Jones recalled, “Drugs hit so hard out there, it turned a lot of strong people into monsters. It was like a horror movie, but we knew the script, so we could move around.”

Nas was at ground zero for the first explosion of hip-hop in the 1980s, when stars from his neighborhood waged a battle for supremacy with rappers from the South Bronx. Nas, who grew up in a home loaded with books, brought inventive rhymes and compact narratives to songs like “One Love.”